"Filmy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... speed enough;" and under an eddying blast of steam the massive locomotives charged past us once more, while I felt a thrill as I watched them, and envied Grant, the engineer. It was something to hold that power in the hollow of one's hand. Thick white powder whirled aloft like smoke before them, a filmy wavy mass that seemed alive rolled aside, while presently the whistle boomed in triumph, and there was an exultant shout from the passengers, for steam had vanquished the snow, and the road lay open before us. Blundering down the gap they had made I climbed on board ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... seen the stars pale rapidly and then the flash of dawn. The Sun rushed up and at once began to grow larger. Earth, with her curved sides still diminishing violently, was soon a small round garden in blue and filmy space, in which mountains were planted. And still the Sun was growing wider and wider. And now Rodriguez, though he knew nothing of Sun or planets, perceived the obvious truth of their terrible journey: they were heading ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... the room, the last golden rays of the perfect June day making a path of light from the gate of roses to the white altar. It shone full across Eugenia's face, down on the long-trained shimmering satin, the little gleaming slippers, the filmy veil that enveloped her, the pearls that glimmered ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... feet. The gondola moved on between the sea-weed banks. Away off by Chioggia, filmy gray clouds grew ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... themselves airs? Well, what does it matter? It's we who have the good time now!" said the little creature beside him, a fairy in filmy white, dancing about him as she spoke, hardly able to keep her feet still for a moment, life ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the only one outside, for Rachel Guest was dreaming her own dream, with an extremely practical side to it, unless Biddy and I were mistaken. She wore Monny's clothes, and used her special perfume, and took advantage of the same initials, to accept gifts of filmy handkerchiefs and monogrammed bags and brushes. Also she had firmly annexed most of the men on board who would, in normal states of mind, have belonged to the Gilded Rose. But they all seemed to have gone mad on the subject of Miss Guest. Even Harry Snell, who had ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... poise; the freshet had frozen on the slanting stone, and was one coat of ice; poor Nest fell, and put out her hip. No more flushing rosy color on that sweet face—no more look of beaming innocent happiness;—instead, there was deadly pallor, and filmy eyes, over which dark shades seemed to chase each other as the shoots of agony grew more and more intense. She screamed once or twice; but the exertion (involuntary, and forced out of her by excessive pain) overcame ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... out just after sunrise to the tin wash basin at the well, the desire to paint was on him with compelling force. The hills ended near their bases like things bitten off. Beyond lay limitless streamers of mist, but, while he stood at gaze, the filmy veil began to lift and float higher. Trees and mountains grew taller. The sun, which showed first as a ghost-like disc of polished aluminum, struggled through orange and vermilion into a sphere of living flame. It was as though the Creator were ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... so well—in his quiet, unobtrusive manner he was making himself so agreeable. Oh, if he would only have stayed with her, and been indeed the son of her right hand, and given himself to the work; and then for a moment there was a filmy look in the mother's eyes, and she listened a little absently to ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... open, the night air still and suave and warm, her sole protection a filmy negligee over a night-dress of sheerest silk and lace. And in that hour Sarah Manvers was as nearly a beautiful woman as ever she was to be—her face faintly flushed in the rich moonlight, faintly ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... wild scramble for front seats. One little maid in particular was such an invariable holder of an advantageous position that my curiosity was aroused to see how she did it. I watched her, saw her glistening brown body—perfectly visible through the filmy material of her single garment—dive under the last row of seats and emerge triumphant at the front while the press was still ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... knew it was not a cloud which shimmered between his eyes and the stars. It was a woman's filmy hair. ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... which she received me was a magnificent salon, with a balcony in front. When I entered, the doors and windows were wide open; the rays of the sun darted through the filmy lace curtains; it was a "tableau en plein air" that met my eye. Countess Diodora, in a mauve-coloured silk dressing-gown, rested on a settee. Before her was a little Venetian mosaic table, and on it a tea-tray. ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... waiting further orders, noting that his master was already sipping coffee with one hand while he made a correction on the proof with the other, Oh My picked up a rosy, filmy, lacy boudoir cap from the floor and departed. His exit was noiseless. He ebbed away like a shadow through the ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... that which ebbed from the Arab drained more important veins, and the wound in his throat especially was terrible. His grasp relaxed, his eyes lost the light of fanaticism and the joy of combat, and grew filmy and expressionless, and he fell heavily at the foot of a ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... a small, delicate-looking old lady, very true to type indeed, with the silvery hair of the devout widow crowned with an exquisite lace cap, in a filmy black dress, with a complexion of precious china, kind shortsighted blue eyes, and white blue-veined hands busy now upon needlework. She bore about with her always an atmosphere of piety, humble, tender, and sincere, but as persistent as ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... thicker recorded in any chapter of tradition. Indeed, if the expression be endurable, so black was the whiteness that it was difficult to know when morning came. There was a fresher shiver in the cold, the sensibility that tree-tops were stirring, a filmy distinction of objects near at hand, and the possibility that somewhere 'way back in the east the rosy fingers of dawn were spread upon a clear horizon. Collisions between ships at sea were reported, and many a good sailorman went down full fathom five to wait for the whistle of the ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... himself sedately, began his quieting operation with appalling energy. The soft rings, gray and delicate, taking curious and airy shapes, floated out and filled the room; but they were not soothing shapes, nor ministering spirits of comfort. They seemed filmy garments, and from their midst faces beautiful, yet faint and dim, looked at him, all of them like unto her face; but when he dropped his pipe and bent forward, the wreaths of smoke fell into lines that ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... and grass came irregularly running. Beneath the trees darkness already obliterated all shape, and the fringes of the wood were so bare of leafage that she could already look up to the grey sky between the boughs and their filmy branches. No vehicles passed. She was alone upon this broad road, with nothing upon either hand but unexplored depths of shadow and silence. Every now and then a stationary light spotted the dusk. She ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... neckerchief, gilt chains, and filagreed buttons, to that of the scrupulously inornate clergyman, than which nothing could be less liable to suspicion. Still all were distinguished by a certain sodden swarthiness of complexion, a filmy dimness of eye, and pallor and compression of lip. There were two other traits, moreover, by which I could always detect them;—a guarded lowness of tone in conversation, and a more than ordinary extension of the thumb in a direction at right angles with the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was the brink of night and everywhere Tall redwoods spread their filmy tops in air; Huge trunks, like shadows upon shadow cast, Pillared the under twilight, vague ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... of honest gratitude. It was some time before I clearly understood that these eyes belonged to a face, and that face the fairest that ever looked on a summer day. First, as my gaze dropped before that vision of radiant beauty, it saw only an exquisite figure draped in a dress of some white and filmy stuff, and swathed around the shoulders with a downy shawl, white also, across which fell one ravishing lock of waving brown, shining golden in the kiss of the now drooping sun. Then the gaze fell lower, lighted upon a little foot thrust slightly forward ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... filmy white robe, is dropping flowers in the path of Apollo (the sun) as he drives his dun-colored horses above the sleeping Earth. The Horae (the hours), a gliding, dancing group of lovely beings, accompany the brilliant god. Each hour is clothed in garments of a special tint of the great light ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... the Virgin as child. St. Anne wears the bizarre fete attire of a Spanish peasant; a gigantic head-dress and veil, large earrings, wide stiff skirts, showing gay flowers on a background of gold. The skirt is rather short, to display wide trousers below it. Her sleeves have filmy frills of deep white ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... notion that in renouncing his allegiance to the Episcopal faith he had gone to the extreme of renouncing marriage, in order that the Mother Church might become his only bride. True, Linford said nothing at all like this;—the idea was fleeting, filmy, traceable to no specific words of his. Yet it left a track across the mind. It seemed to be the very spirit of his speech upon the subject. Certainly no other reason had been suggested for the regrettable, severance of this domestic tie. Conjecture ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... inlaid With jewels wrought in golden filigree, An opal from some elfin treasury Burning with fire and flashing every shade; While round the dim horizon, wide displayed The clouds pile up their largess tenderly As if to clothe the beauty of the sea In filmy gossamer ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... past seven Platt and Miss Asher sat at a table in a Broadway restaurant. She was dressed in a plain, filmy black. Platt didn't know that it was all a ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... thought was that I was back again in the room where Lucia and I had talked together. I felt something perfumed and soft like a caress. It seemed like the filmy lace that the Countess wore upon her shoulder. My head lay against it. I heard a voice say, as it had been in my ear, through the murmuring floods of many waters—"My boy! my boy! And I, wicked one that I ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... as it not infrequently does in that country before the snow. Then a white powder was whirled into her face, filling her eyes and searing the skin, while the horses were plunging at a gallop through a filmy haze, and Winston, whitened all over, leaned forward with lowered head hurling hoarse encouragement at them. His voice reached her fitfully through the roar of wind, until sight and hearing were lost alike as the white haze closed about ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... Mrs. Fairfax said, returning his kiss and dropping basket and scissors to bestow all her attention upon his buttonhole rose. "There is no special occasion for all this extravagance," she added, giving a complacent downward glance at the filmy embroideries of her gown, and her small whiteshod feet. "In fact, to-day breaks before me a long and delicious blank. I don't know when I have had such a Saturday. I shall write letters this morning—or perhaps wash my hair—I don't ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... Her filmy web of Coan weave with golden broidery gleams; Her swarthy slaves the Indian sun touched with ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... in the lagoons—Venice no longer visible behind; the Alps and Euganeans shrouded in a noonday haze; the lowlands at the mouth of Brenta marked by clumps of trees ephemerally faint in silver silhouette against the filmy, shimmering horizon. Form and colour have disappeared in light-irradiated vapour of an opal hue. And yet instinctively we know that we are not at sea; the different quality of the water, the piles emerging here and there above the surface, the suggestion of coast-lines scarcely felt in this infinity ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... and Betty had started to dress. Mechanically, with fingers that shook a little from excitement, she went through the early stages of the process, until it was time to slip into the pretty filmy lace dress she was to wear for the first part ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... no wonder if yet no woman assenting Softly to thine embrace tender a delicate arm. Not tho' a gift should seek, some robe most filmy, to move her; Not for a cherish'd gem's clarity, ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... year ago. Neither would admit that there had been any drifting apart, they had never been less than lovers, yet now they experienced the delights of a reconciliation. Julia, in her delicate linens and thin embroidered pongees, with a filmy parasol shading her bright hair, seemed more wonderful than ever before, and lovely Hawaii was a setting for one of ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... river, whose disparted waves Dart off asunder with an angry sound, How soon to re-unite! And see! they meet, Each in the other lost and found: and see Placeless, as spirits, one soft water-sun Throbbing within them, heart at once and eye! With its soft neighbourhood of filmy clouds, The stains and shadings of forgotten tears, Dimness o'erswum with lustre! Such the hour Of deep enjoyment, following love's brief feuds; And hark, the noise of a near waterfall! I pass ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... bright green above, and more downy beneath; more coarsely serrate. Fruit not so long, and more ovate, with much larger and thinner scales, the lobes hardly spreading. A large tree, 50 to 90 ft. high, with yellowish or silvery-gray bark peeling off into very thin, filmy layers from the trunk. Wood whiter, and not so useful. Rich, moist woodlands, especially northward; ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... white throat, where it was clasped with a flashing diamond. A solitaire diamond blazed on her left hand—those slender, delicate little hands—her engagement ring, no doubt. They were all the jewels she wore. The trimming of her dress was of filmy black lace, and all her masses of bright golden hair were twisted coronet-wise round her noble and lovely head. She was very tall, very slender; and the exquisite face just tinted with only the faintest shadow of rose. "Beautiful, and stately, and proud as a queen!" Yes, she looked all ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... 'manifold writers'—a black blank page beneath the flimsy sheet on which we write, but presently the black page will be taken away, and the writing will stand out plain on the page behind that we did not see. Life is the filmy, unsubstantial page on which our pen rests; the black page is death; and the page beneath is that indelible transcript of our earthly actions, which we shall find waiting for us to read, with shame and confusion of face, or with humble joy, in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particularly awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or ossified, to the finger-touch of all outward agencies; knowing something of the filmy threads of this web of life in which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... crossing the stage they took their seats in tiers, a lovely spectacle. At the last came the Red Cross workers, the nurses, the motor corps and others in war service. The picture ended with a gay group of debutantes in filmy chiffon gowns to symbolize the present day of rejoicing. The triumphs of women in the intellectual field were told in the program that followed: Education—Professor Maria L. Sanford; Medicine—Dr. Julia Holmes Smith; Law—Miss Florence Allen; Theology—the Rev. Olympia ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... round and dim, Behind the waste, behind the gibbets high, The witches' moon, with filmy bloodshot eye, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... swimming step peculiar to women who are accustomed to the eyes of critical assemblages. Her thin black dress was too elaborate for a country drive; it was a concession to the heat which yet permitted the wearing of a hat, a filmy creation supporting a pair of wings that started up from her beautiful head like white flames. But Mrs. Thorne chiefly observed the look of tense preparation in the face that met hers. She retreated a little from what ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... in the sky, but the great heat had caused a haze to overlie the valley, gathering thickly along the winding course of the river, and hanging in little sprays and feathers over the woodlands which clothe its banks. Through this filmy vapour there broke from time to time fierce sparkles of brilliant light as the sun's rays fell upon breastplate or headpiece. Now and again the gentle summer breeze wafted up sudden pulses of martial music ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the cherry-trees were in blossom, and the alders and shad bushes were white in the borders of the woods against the filmy green of the birches. The young women got out their summer muslins, and trimmed their bonnets anew; their faces, all unknown to themselves, took on a new meaning of the spring, like new flowers, and ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... magical they lay. The walls were hung with armor, and about In the dim corners stood the sculptured forms Of Cytheris, and Dian, and stern Jove; And from the casement soberly away, Fell the grotesque long shadows, full and true, And, like a veil of filmy mellowness, The lint-specks floated in ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... American short stories, the best short stories in the world, surpass in nothing so much as in their handling of those filmy textures which clothe the vague shapes of the borderland between experience and illusion. This is perhaps because our people, who seem to live only in the most tangible things of material existence, really ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... just at the moment, a spider dropped, With its silken, filmy clue; And the King, in the midst of his thinking, stopped To see ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... waters gleam And sparkle with the sun's warm beam, Reflecting then some mirrored cloud Like specter wrapt in filmy shroud— Till pouring down with fretful whirl They o'er the mill-dam rush and curl, And foaming round in eddies deep, The ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... lying in broad strips of light and shade amid green surrounding fells. The sun was slipping low, and would soon have kindled all the lake into a white fire, in which its islands would have almost disappeared. But, for the moment, everything was plain:—the sky, full of light, and filmy grey cloud, the fells with their mingling of wood and purple crag, the shallow reach of the river beyond the garden, with a little family of wild duck floating upon it, and just below her a vivid splash of colour, a mass of rhododendron in bloom, setting its rose-pink challenge ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the colour of molasses taffy when you've pulled it—but all fluffy and wonderful, with stardust in it. Her cheeks were pink and cream, and her brown eyes gazed, wide open, full of wonder. She wore a dinner gown of soft olive green, with a cream white scarf of some filmy material thrown about ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... bad one. He fell into uneasy dozes, only to arouse, thinking the men in the old mansion were trying to escape. Then he would sit up and listen, but he could hear nothing. It seemed as if morning would never come, but at length the stars began to fade, and the sky seemed overcast with a filmy, white veil. Tom sat up, rubbed his smarting eyes, ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... knew that he had lost the opportunity to recall Pierre and his companion. He looked at the handkerchief more, closely. It was a dainty fabric, so soft that it gave barely the sensation of touch when he crushed it in the palm of his hand. For a few moments he was puzzled to account for the filmy strip of lace. Then the truth came to him. Jeanne had used it ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... that nowhere, at least in their immediate neighbourhood, could they discover a spot capable of being scaled. Before them, and occupying the whole bottom of this enormous basin, stretched a placid lake, the water of which was as clear as crystal. A thin filmy veil of vapour rose everywhere from the surface of the water, softening the hard outlines of the more distant landscape, and imparting an aspect of dreamlike witchery and unreality which it would certainly have ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... one another, then dropped to the first open spot, to flounder there a moment, then roar in snoring sleep. Against the wall a bearded giant half leaned, half lay, one tooth touching the ragged lips and breaking the filmy skin, while the blood dripped, slow drop after slow drop, upon his black, tousled beard. ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... Russian ambassador." This writer tells us, "It was diverting to see how the pelican would toss up and turn a flat fish, plaice or flounder, to get it right into its gullet at its lower beak, which being filmy stretches to a prodigious wideness when it devours a great fish. Here was also a small water-fowl, not bigger than a more-hen, that went almost quite erect like the penguin of America. It would eate as much fish as its whole body weighed, yet ye body ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... Josh," said the young fellow, wrinkling his sun-browned forehead, and still turning the soft nets into filmy ropes by passing ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... was the forest adjoining the birch grove. It was a heavy growth of hardwood trees, interspersed with slender ash and maples, which with their scanty foliage resembled a labyrinth of green and yellow network, like filmy dotted lace, hung on the taller, darker oaks. Jonathan felt safer in this deep wood. He could still see several rods in advance. Following the trail, he was relieved to see that Wetzel's leaps had become shorter and shorter, until they once again were about the length ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... jackets; she, who would have been lost in it like a cat in a rug, enjoyed the thought of the force of the creature capable of wearing it lightly for a garment. Withal the rough, soft surface of it was agreeable to the hand. Out of one of the immense pockets hung the end of a coloured silk muffler, filmy as anything that she ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... had been finding very unsatisfactory, and on most of his associates (myself, for example, whenever I happened to speak an appreciative word for his essentially admirable father), but on the community as such. A filmy visitant from Elsewhere had grazed his forehead and whispered in his ear that the town allotted to him by destiny was crude, alike in its deficiencies and in its affirmations, and that complete satisfaction for him lay altogether in another ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... the kidneys, remove the filmy skin that covers them and cut them in the middle without, however, detaching completely the two parts. Season with salt and pepper, grease with oil and put them on a strong fire on the grill. After ten or twelve minutes ...
— The Italian Cook Book - The Art of Eating Well • Maria Gentile
... sunbeams, an identical design appears; and, on a summer morning, as the eye carefully roams over a lawn, how often do the most perfect little suspension-bridges hang from spear to spear of herbage, their filmy span embossed with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... came into view at that instant, and his lips were closed. The painter was laying a soft, filmy scarf over the girl's bare shoulders as ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... the great ridge, a silvery effulgence proclaimed the coming of the moon. Her brilliant light silhouetted the grim and rocky ridge in startling clearness, though it was four thousand feet above us. Through a gap rises a peak, round which a filmy cloud had lovingly wrapped itself like a lace shawl upon the snowy shoulders of a beautiful woman. We took a turn down the quay, and at the end we turned our back on this witching view. Hardly had we retraced our steps a few yards when ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... laugh on her lips—red lips that showed rose-like and tempting behind a thick chiffon veil, obviously donned for an excellent reason. The exquisite features of Miss Guile were barely distinguishable beneath the surface of this filmy barrier. The door closed sharply and, almost before the Prince had recovered from his surprise, the car glided off in the direction of the Place ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... great thing that can't compare with anything at home, and that is its view. It is wonderful! I wish I could make you see it. There is a mountain at the end of it that has as many different garments as a queen. To-night, when sunset came, it grew filmy as if a gauze of many colors had dropped upon it and melted into it, and glowed and melted until it turned to slate blue under the wide, starred blue of the wonderful night sky, and all the dark about was velvet. Last night ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... uppermost brains of the friars. Dear old fellows! in the midst of that solemn land their Christian laughter rang loudly and merrily, their eyes kept flashing with joyous bonfires, and their heavy woollen petticoats could no more weigh down the springiness of their paces, than the filmy gauze of a danseuse can clog her ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... founded upon the disturbance of the chaotic matter by heat and cold. Nay, more, Anaximander explained the origin of living creatures on like principles, for the sun's heat, acting upon the primal miry earth, produced filmy bladders or bubbles, and these, becoming surrounded with a prickly rind, at length burst open, and, as from an egg, animals came forth. At first they were ill-formed and imperfect, but subsequently elaborated and developed. As to man, so far from being produced ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... and yield herself to the luxury of summer idleness. A robin was chirping far overhead, and from the grass at her feet there came the whir of a grasshopper. Otherwise, save for the music of the stream, all was still. An exquisite, filmy drowsiness crept ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... stir is in the air! The wave—there is a movement there! As if the towers had thrust aside, In slightly sinking, the dull tide— As if their tops had feebly given A void within the filmy Heaven. The waves have now a redder glow— The hours are breathing faint and low— And when, amid no earthly moans, Down, down that town shall settle hence, Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, Shall do ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... excitement of their love combat produces a stiffness for my beautiful wife to mount upon me and then have our charming son to put his prick into her bottom for this, too, is necessary to my failing vigour, and the contact of his vigorous young prick against the thin filmy substance separating us feels as nothing. I am long in spending, and his delighted mother gets two and sometime three delicious discharges in her arse before my lazy prick deluges her ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... ladies was richly colored. Many of their skirts were of silk covered with hand embroidered flowers, and their filmy pina waists and broad collar pieces were rich with needle-work. They all wore a kind of heelless velvet slipper, very common as a dress shoe in the Philippines, or high-heeled patent leather shoes with neatly fitting ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... of England, who tarried here with Clementina Sobieski through some twelve months of his ex-royal exile! The memories of all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy shadows. We cannot grasp them, localise them, people surrounding emptiness with more than withering ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... His filmy eyes were full of questions. But at first his tongue would not speak. He looked up at the bare skylight and around at the bleached walls, and then back into the face of the peddler. ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... he shouted, as we approached, "let's get this scene now—number one twenty-six. Loring—Gordon! Shake a leg—here, I'll read it again. 'Daring enters. He is scarcely seated at the desk, examining papers, when Zelda enters in a filmy negligee. Daring looks up amazed and Zelda pretends great agitation. Daring is not unkind to her. He tells her he has not discovered the will as yet. Spoken title: "I am sure that I can find a will ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... hulk, the sky, with the exception of a filmy haze overhanging the eastern end of the island, was clear. Now, as they emerged from the cabin, this haze had solidified and was coming—one of the black and vicious squalls of the West ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... something like a cross, as if he were going through a religious rite, altered the elevation delicately, then flung up his hand and head stiffly, like a dog pointing. "Number 4"—and Number 4 gun hurled out fire and filmy smoke, then leaped back, half frightened at its own fury, half anxious to get a better view of what it had done. It was a little over. "Nineteen hundred," cried the major. Same ritual, only a little short. "Nineteen fifty"—and it was just right. Therewith field and mountain ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... found her in the music room. She had taken the chair which Judge Wilton had occupied an hour before, and was leaning one elbow on an arm of it, her chin resting in the cup of her hand. Her dress—a filmy lavender so light that it shaded almost to pink, and magically made to bring out the grace of her figure—drew his attention to the slight sag of her shoulders, ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... harvest moon in the sky, and the hills were bathed in a kind of spectral splendour—a faint and filmy shimmer of silver that left the outlines of objects blurred and elusive, though the scene as a whole emerged clearly for the eye. The wind was sighing drowsily across the moors, while high on the rugged cairns on the hill-tops it was wuthering ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... of varying brightness, poured down from a gap in the cloud-roof and split themselves in patches of molten silver upon the leaden greyness. And at his furthest right a sky of pure pale blue might arch to where layers of filmy cirrus were blurred by a faint burnished hue that was neither brown nor rose but a mingling of the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... series of parallel disks of exquisite delicacy, which rotated round an axis perpendicular to their surfaces, and finally blended to a screw surface with an inclined generatrix. This gradually changed into a filmy funnel, from the narrow end of which the 'cord' extended to ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... had lost its color. Heavy blue-white clouds with shredded, filmy foundations, which seemed almost to sweep the waters, moved swiftly to the westward, while in the background the wall of mist advanced silently to encompass them. They could feel its breath, heavy, ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... Which rather shortly—put question brought Mr. Motley to a stand. Much as when one pushes on into daylight through the filmy finespun work of a spider, that respectable insect looks about, considering where he ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... jigging outside a booth in red bodice and spangles, a waif, a little who-knows-who, suppose her pretty to death—what is she even then but an iridescent bubble, as one might say, thrown up by some standing pool of vice, as filmy, very nearly as fleeting, and quite as poisonous? It struck him as he watched—not the girl in particular, but a whole genus centred in her—as really extraordinary, as an obliquity of Providence, that such ephemerids must abound, predestined to misery; must ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... Japan? With us, a plum or cherry tree in flower is not an astonishing sight; but here it is a miracle of beauty so bewildering that, however much you may have previously read about it, the real spectacle strikes you dumb. You see no leaves—only one great filmy mist of petals. Is it that the trees have been so long domesticated and caressed by man in this land of the Gods, that they have acquired souls, and strive to show their gratitude, like women loved, by making themselves more beautiful for man's ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... she stayed there at the window. Sometimes dozing in the chair; once waking with a start, fancying that her husband was bending over her. Had he been—and stolen away? And the dawn came; dew-grey, filmy and wistful, woven round each black tree, and round the white dove-cot, and falling scarf-like along the river. And the chirrupings of birds stirred among leaves as ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... see Helen in filmy summer dress instead of the severe uniform of a nurse, and Zaidos missed the white cap on her beautiful hair, but he decided finally that she was even prettier without it. Zaidos could not keep from watching her every move. She ordered Tony about with a pretty air of sternness, but with such a ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... horrified him. The jewels with which they were loaded made their fatigued looks, dark-ringed eyes, heavy profiles, thick flabby lips, like a dromedary's, still more distressing; and with their bare necks and arms—it was etiquette at Madame Fontaine's receptions—which allowed one to see through filmy lace their flabby flesh or bony skeletons, they were as ridiculous as an elegant cloak would be upon ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... bacillus and a Gram negative short bacillus. The third gelatine plate prepared from this mixture, on inspection after four day's incubation, showed twenty-five colonies—seven moist yellow colonies, each sinking into a shallow pit of liquefied gelatine, fourteen flat irridescent filmy colonies, and four raised white slimy colonies. A film preparation (stained Gram) from each variety examined microscopically showed that the yellow liquefying colony was composed of Gram positive micrococci; the flat colony of Gram positive bacilli and the ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... a moment and looked at the garrison. The moon had crept high and the place was very still. We were safe for the night. I lit my pipe, and the smoke that spiraled above me did not seem more filmy than the chance that had saved us. I suddenly shivered. But we were safe. I gave the troops ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... be sitting in her boudoir, very much in negligee, about now. In a minute the faithful Jacques will escort Monsieur Tarzan into her presence without announcing him. It will take a few minutes for explanations. Olga will look very alluring in the filmy creation that is her night-dress, and the clinging robe which but half conceals the charms that the former does not conceal at all. Olga will be surprised, ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... circumference of the crater agitated, saw it rise and fall as avalanches of rock and earth slid into it, tons and thousands of tons rushing down the slope, blotting from our sight the flickering ring of flame, and extinguishing the last filmy ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... ev'n the woods, whose shade The sister poplars thicken'd. Soon he feels His utterance shrill and weak: his streaming locks Soft snowy plumes displace: high from his chest, His lengthen'd neck extends: a filmy web Unites his ruddy toes: his sides are cloth'd With quills and feathers: where his mouth was seen Expanded, now a blunted beak obtains; And Cycnus stands a bird;—but bird unknown In days of yore. Mistrustful still of Jove, His heaven he shuns; as mindful of the flames ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... exquisite, excellent, recherche, elegant, splendid, admirable, choice, select, attractive, delicate, subtle, minute, capillary, tenuous, thin, subtile, ethereal, attenuated, filmy, flimsy, gossamery, slender; comminuted, bolted, pulverized, impalpable, powdered. Antonyms: coarse, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Argosy-All-Story-Weekly for May 14, 1921. Described as a "different" serial, it was introduced by a cover by Modest Stein. In the foreground was the profile of a girl of another dimension—ethereal, sensuous, the eternal feminine—the Nervina of the story. Filmy crystalline earrings swept back over her bare shoulders. Dominating the background was a huge flaming yellow ball, like our Sun as seen from the hypothetical Vulcan— splotched with murky, mysterious globii vitonae. There was an ancient quay, and emerging ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... women, she had the name of being the haughtiest. She gathered up her skirts in other people's houses when the plebeian element came too near. Now she waved him to a chair, and gently sank into another, her trailing robe of thin filmy black with golden flecks falling about her like ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... hung, they knew not how long, in rapture on the sight; and then, looking back from the shore to the spot where they had stood, they felt relieved that unreality should possess itself of all, and that the bridge should swing there in mid-air like a filmy web, scarce more passable than the rainbow that flings ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... trailing off into the deep shadow of the wooded banks, no more the tremulous reflection of the moon, swinging like some supernal craft in the great lacustrine sweep where the stream broadens in rounding the point. Now a filmy veil was over all, yet the night was so fine that the light filtered through the mist, and objects were still discernible, though only vaguely visible, like the furnishings of a dream. A rowboat was rocking on the ripples among the boulders at the water's edge. As the child made the perilous ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... while preparing for the bath; whistled like a blackbird as she stood before the pier-glass before the maid hooked her into a filmy, rosy evening gown—her first touch of ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... faint light of the misty October morning was spreading up slowly from the east, the delicate hoar frost of autumn was lying like a filmy veil of silvery gossamer over the furze bushes and rough grass around the camping-place, before the pair of pleasure-seekers returned. By that time, however, Tonio was sleeping soundly beside the piebalds ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... and Tide Have washed away, like weeds upon the sands, Crowds of the olden life's memorials; And 'mid the mountains you as well might seek For the lone site of fancy's filmy dreams. Towers have decay'd and moulder'd from the cliffs, Or their green age, or grey, has help'd to build New dwellings sending up their household smoke From treeless places once inhabited But by the secret sylvans. On the moors The pillar-stone, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... east wall of the vicarage of Burgh-by-sands was coated with a tissue of web so delicate that it required a very close scrutiny to detect it. I could find none of the spinners. Every square inch of the building appeared coated with filmy lines, crossing in places, but mostly horizontal, from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... forward, with his brilliant ingratiating smile, and made low obeisance to the women before him. Then he produced another tribute, a broad soft scarf of filmy texture, rich in color and pattern, a lovely thing, even to my eye, and offered it with a deep bow to the tall unsmiling woman who seemed to head the ranks before him. She took it with a gracious nod of acknowledgment, and passed it ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... while her beams seemed as it were absorbed by the fleecy whiteness of the mist, where it lay thick and condensed; and gave to the more light and vapoury specks, which were elsewhere visible, a sort of filmy transparency resembling the lightest veil of silver gauze. Despite the uncertainty of my situation, a view so romantic, joined to the active and inspiring influence of the frosty atmosphere, elevated my spirits ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and now break it into a hundred, by merely disturbing the water where I see it, 'like sunshine broken in a rill.' Who knows but it may be the just-arrived light of an old, old star which has just come to us? How easy to climb back on one of these filmy rays, myriads of millions of leagues, home to its source! I will take off the bandage and let the poor boy see it, and climb ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... saw her she was in her coffin. It was almost full of white blossoms—jasmine, Eucharis lilies, white roses, and in the midst of the flowers the hands lay folded, and the face was veiled with some delicate, filmy handkerchief. ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... a quiet dinner-party, to which Mary came down in her frock of filmy black, which made a delightful setting for her fair paleness. At these dinners she encountered famous men and women, and looked at them from afar off with wistful interest. In the drawing-room afterwards she saw Lady Agatha the centre of a brilliant group. Someone said of her that ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... a year ago, which this time he swore to put to better use. The girl knew his thoughts as she had known the accolade of the thundering hoofs behind them. She would have thrown herself if the steel trap had loosed ever so little; as it was, she fluttered like a rag caught in a bush; the filmy body was what Galors held, the soul shrilled prayers to the man's confusion. He could not stay her lips; they moved, working against him, as he knew well. "Mother of God, send him, send him, send him!" It was ill fighting against a girl's soul, it slacked ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... and lay down on the sand again. He noticed that the water in the east seemed to feel the approach of morning even before the sky. Gradually the day dawned, a slowly lightening gray at first, until the coming sun spattered a filmy cloud with gold and crimson. Renmark watched the glory of the sunrise, took one lingering look at the curved beauty of the bay shore, shook the sand from his clothing, and started back for the ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... his feet and approached slowly, a new consciousness dawning in his soul, a new light in his eyes. Of the style or texture of her gown, a filmy, gleaming mass of white, he knew absolutely nothing; he only knew that its clinging softness revealed in new beauty the rounded outlines of her form; that its snowy sheen set off the exquisite moulding of her neck and arms; that its long, shimmering folds accentuated the height ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... a filmy affair—ivory white with glints of gold. Her gauzy gold wedding-sash, swathed round her hips, fell in a fringed knot below her knee. Filmy sleeves floated from her shoulders, leaving the arms bare and unadorned, except for one gold bangle, high up—the latest note from ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... most find a good light for that. Oh, now we come to the oil-paintings. We both presumed you would do well at the oil-paintings; and for my part," continued Mr. Bell definitely, "I like them best. There's more variety in them." He was holding at arm's-length, as he spoke, an oblong scrap of filmy blue sky and marshy green fields in a preposterously wide, flat, dull gold frame, and looking at it in a puzzled way. Presently he reversed it and ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... was white, with a sickly pasty whiteness. In the few hours that had passed he seemed to have wasted to a startling gauntness. His cheeks were drawn, his sunken eyes dull and filmy. He moved slowly and heavily, as if compelling ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... their coats, and lay down then under filmy mosquito bars, and presently sleep came to them. Indeed, to Kettle came so dead an unconsciousness that he afterward had a suspicion (though it was beyond proof) that some drug had been mixed with his drink. He was a man who at all times was extraordinarily ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... spite of her alarm, Diana ran after it, and, on reaching the upper storey, heard it making a terrific racket in the room above the one in which she now slept. Nothing daunted, however, she boldly approached, and, flinging open the door, perceived its filmy outline standing before a shadowy and very antique eight-day clock, which apparently it was in the habit of winding. A great fear now fell on Diana. What was the thing? And supposing it should turn ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... had seemed in the picture they lay there under her amazed eyes—the pointed, satiny black slippers of the dancing girl, with their absurdly slender heels and brilliant buckles, and filmy stockings to match. And underneath lay two folded squares of shimmering stuff, dull black and burnished scarlet, scarce thicker than the silk of ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... the Rectory door, which always stood hospitably open in fine weather, and walked to the boat-house, as if intending to launch out upon the water. The day was sunny on the whole, but not cloudless: the sun shone out brightly every now and then, and was again obscured by a filmy haze, such as rises so easily from the low-lying land in Essex. But the golden haze softened the distant outlines of wood and meadow, and the sun's beams rested tenderly upon the rapidly stripping branches, where a few rustling leaves still told of their departed glories. The long undefined ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... of Italy are seen through the distortion of convention, the palaces of Venice were never builded by the hand of man; and we lose by this the contrast which nature provides between solid earth and filmy cloud. The onlooker must indeed be devoid of imagination, however, if he can stand before those pictures of Turner where the limitless sky is reflected in the waters, without profound emotion. They may not seem natural in such sense as one finds works ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... Chinaman not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails bulging sideways like insolent cheeks; the ribbed and pitted coal-dust on our decks, all iridescent under the sun; the first filmy haze that paled the shadows of our funnels about lunch time; the gradual die-down and dulling over of the short, cheery seas; the sea that changed to a swell: the swell that crumbled up and ran allwhither oilily: the triumphant, almost audible roll inward of wandering fog-walls that ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... and white and gold,—the paper which covered the walls was Indian, beginning low down with a profusion of tropical leaves and birds and insects, and gradually diminishing in richness of detail till at the top it ended in the most delicate tendrils and most filmy insects. ...
— Round the Sofa • Elizabeth Gaskell
... she reclined luxuriously on a lounge. A thin spiral of smoke rose like incense to the ceiling from her lips. The slow, regular rise and fall of her breathing beneath the filmy lace of her gown accented the perfect fullness ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine |
